ART/ARCHITECTURE; A Sculptor's Colossus of the Desert

MICHAEL HEIZER doesn't want you to know where he lives, just that he's in the middle of nowhere in the middle of Nevada.

His ranch is an isolated copse of trees and low buildings in an immense, flat, otherwise bone-dry valley -- a desert ringed by mountains, 40 miles, more or less, from the nearest neighbor, up to two hours' drive to the closest paved road. Beside the house is what looks from a distance like a low, U-shaped enclosure, an odd though not particularly dramatic bump in the land. Scale is deceptive in the desert. Up close, the bump turns into Mr. Heizer's sculpture ''City,'' or, to be precise, the first phase of it, which he has just finished. The sculpture consists of three rectangular structures around a curved, sunken gravel-coated court or pit.

The structures -- which he calls ''complexes,'' a term archaeologists use for buildings at ancient sites -- are immense concrete and dirt mastabas, rectangles with sloped sides. ''Complex 2'' is by itself more than a quarter-mile long. Its irregular surface incorporates two projections, one triangular and one rectangular, and several upright slabs that poke up over the top like mountain peaks. The slabs (Mr. Heizer calls them steles) rise as much as 70 feet and weigh up to a thousand tons each.

Altogether, what exists of ''City'' has got to be one of the most massive modern sculptures ever built. After nearly 30 years, Mr. Heizer has passed the first stage toward completing what is essentially his own Chichen Itza in the desert. There are four more stages to go.

During the late 1960's and early 70's, art began to move outdoors from galleries, and Mr. Heizer, among American artists, helped lead the way. He started as a painter, making shaped canvases with spaces carved out of the middle of them. In 1967, he completed ''North, East, South, West 1,'' which included several holes he dug in the Sierra Nevada, the holes akin to the shapes in his paintings. He did similar works in the Mojave desert, and in 1968 he did ''Nine Nevada Depressions'': big, curved and zigzagging trenches, like abstract doodles on the earth, placed intermittently over a span of 520 miles. Another early sculpture, ''Cilia,'' turned dug forms into light wells to catch the sun at different angles. His ''Dye Paintings'' involved big bags of white lime powder and concentrated aniline dyes scattered across the desert floor, and he also drove a motorcycle across a dry lake bed, the tire tracks becoming like drawn lines.

Partly the move outdoors by Mr. Heizer and others reflected 60's art politics, the new eco-spirit and a general reaction against the art object as commodity. Works in the land were things that you couldn't put on your mantle, that didn't even necessarily last. Some of them, like ''Nine Nevada Depressions,'' involved removing dirt to create sculptures out of the spaces left behind. ''Un-sculpture'' is the term Mr. Heizer likes, along with ''sculpture in reverse.'' Negation, duration and decay became part of a new sculptural vocabulary.

The move outdoors also involved a rejection of prevailing modernist ideology, and in particular of the critic Clement Greenberg's notion that the best art had to concentrate on its own formal properties. Artists working outdoors wanted to reconnect the art world and the real world. Their materials were no longer canvas and paint or marble but dirt, sand and steel -- even sun and air.

Of course, not just Americans were involved in this quiet revolution. Joseph Beuys was in Germany; Richard Long was in England; and the Arte Povera group was in Italy. That said, Mr. Long was leaving discreet marks on the countryside. Mr. Heizer was blowing up things with explosives, so the connections were real but limited. And there was something particularly American about the size and ambition of some of the outdoor works. The Abstract Expressionists had made large scale a characteristic of American art. Beginning in the late 1940's, writings about Pollock and others often referred to the expanses of the West. By the 1960's artists like Mr. Heizer, with Pollock clearly in mind, were making art in the landscape of a size to rival it. A 520-mile sculpture is a very big thing.

Mr. Heizer came up with the idea for ''City'' in 1970, when he was in the Yucatan studying the serpent motif in the ball court at Chichen Itza. He was 24. The previous year he finished ''Double Negative,'' a spectacular 1,500-foot-long, 50-foot-deep, 30-foot-wide gash cut onto facing slopes of an obscure mesa in Nevada, a project that required blasting 240,000 tons of rock. It was quickly recognized as the archetype of what people were beginning to call Land Art or Earth Art or Environmental Art. It made a huge impact.

His next plan, for ''City,'' was to build a suite of giant, variously shaped abstract sculptures over an area that covered more than a mile end to end -- modern art turned into monumental abstract architecture, with ancient ruins as the model. Mr. Heizer's goal with ''City'' was to link contemporary American art and Pollock's legacy with the grandeur of the Olmecs, Mayans, Incas and Aztecs. ''I was just doing what had already been done for centuries, but not in a while,'' he says. ''City'' was a very American kind of dream: big, brash, maverick, optimistic and a little loopy.

MR. HEIZER lives beside ''City'' in a comfortable ranch house with wood-burning stoves, a Remington sculpture, a big satellite television and a beamed ceiling. ''Shrubs of the Great Basin'' and ''Weeds of the West'' are on a bookshelf in the kitchen. An outbuilding for solar panels and a generator is across from a metal shop where he spends most of his time. And there are also studios for him and his assistants, Mary Shanahan and Jennifer Mackiewicz, artists who've been with him for about a decade. Indefatigable, patient pioneers, they somehow manage to do their own work while bringing order to Mr. Heizer's life. When necessary, they'll change a tire or haul heavy equipment. He is devoted to them.

There are dogs, cats, horses, sheep and cattle, and machinery everywhere: road graders, loaders, tractors, horse trailers, manure spreaders, concrete mixers. The place is an industrial construction site, working farm and survivalists' hideaway.

In 1970, Mr. Heizer hired G. Robert Deiro, a pilot from Las Vegas, to help him find the property. It had sand and gravel, running water from a creek, isolation, the right climate -- and it was cheap. Almost 90 percent of Nevada is public land. This was private property surrounded by public land. Mr. Heizer gradually acquired three square miles, at $30 an acre. The last parcel was paid off two years ago. ''Even I could save $150 a month,'' Mr. Heizer says. ''Bob helped me get it, parcel by parcel. He went into county records and researched the owners. They all wanted to sell. Why not? Barren land in the middle of nowhere? It was the best thing that ever happened to them.''

At first Mr. Heizer lived in a trailer with his wife, Barbara (they were divorced a couple of years ago). There was a weed-covered livestock trail to the property, and Mr. Heizer wore out a new truck a year getting to and from the place. Half the winter he'd be locked in. Once he went for 10 months and saw only a couple of sheep trailers and the occasional pickup truck in the distance.

He began work on ''Complex 1'' in 1971. A farmer lent him a paddle-wheel scraper to move dirt. Seismic engineers drew up plans for the 30-ton, T-shaped and L-shaped concrete columns that protrude from the complex. When the sculpture is viewed straight on from a distance, these shapes align visually to make a frame around the structure: an optical illusion causes the complex's slope to seem to flatten into a monochrome rectangle, three stories high, like one of Mr. Heizer's early paintings.

Mr. Heizer was able to finish most of ''Complex 1'' by himself. He began ''Complex 2'' in 1980 and ''Complex 3'' after that. But it was becoming increasingly difficult to go on as his cash dwindled. ''A lot of money over the years went into simply trying to maintain old, useless equipment,'' he says.

He painted and made other sculptures during the 80's, including one called ''Levitated Mass'' that was installed outside the I.B.M. building on 57th Street at Madison Avenue. ''I never stopped working on the pit and the complexes, whenever I could afford to,'' he says. ''But we're talking crazy optimism here.''

Mr. Heizer had met the artists Walter De Maria in 1966 and Robert Smithson in 1969 in New York, and they became linked with him as Land artists. He brought them west. Smithson finished ''Spiral Jetty'' in Utah in 1970. Mr. De Maria made ''Lightning Field'' in New Mexico a few years later. Those works became famous. While Mr. Heizer was immersed in his ''City,'' Smithson wrote articles that made him the unofficial spokesman for the movement.

Increasingly, Mr. Heizer felt usurped and cheated. He began to seethe about the New York art scene, which he regarded as fickle and amnesiac. His frustration grew as the years went by. His freestanding sculptures included big stones carved into shapes that recalled tools. They were sometimes perforated like Swiss cheese or wedged into metal frames. Because of their size, he could never really show his work properly in New York, he felt, so he couldn't ''play the game.'' His first gallery show of any real size in the city -- and therefore of any value to him, he says -- happened only five years ago, at Ace Gallery, when he was already 50.

Mention Robert Smithson or a few others associated with Earthworks to Mr. Heizer and he's off. ''High-speed hustlers'' is one of the few printable terms. ''What was some guy from New Jersey doing building a sculpture like mine on a lake in Utah?'' he asks about Smithson and ''Spiral Jetty.''

''But I figure, how much more original can you get than having nine different people doing what I did first, and none of them giving me credit? Actually, it's the academics who did not do a good historical job who are really to blame. I wasn't political enough to write articles about myself or go to cocktail parties, meaning that not only has my art been pirated and my intellectual property rights stolen, but my work has been misrepresented.''

By 1997, Mr. Heizer was feeling exhausted and thinking about demolishing what existed of Complexes 2 and 3, leaving just Complex 1. Then Michael Govan, the director of the Dia Foundation, stepped in and, with money from both Dia and the Lannan Foundation (nobody would say how much), he arranged to pay to complete the three complexes and pit. There was an irony about this that wasn't lost on Mr. Heizer. Dia had offered to underwrite the whole project when Mr. Heizer started it 30 years ago, but he had declined. Heiner Friedrich, who founded Dia, had been Mr. Heizer's first dealer, and the two had fallen out.

With money, Mr. Heizer was able to hire outside help. Decades of pent-up desire combined with the inexperience of the construction crew to make the situation sometimes rocky at first. Mr. Heizer can be warm and solicitous, but also touchy, anxious and strong willed. The men had never worked on a project like this, which involved unusual materials, gigantic forms in odd shapes and tricky conditions. Storms would sweep across the valley and, in minutes, wipe out $30,000 of labor on one of the steles. This happened four or five times. The surfaces of the complexes required constant readjustment. Mr. Heizer would become upset when the shape of one of the forms he had drawn was not reproduced as he wanted. He wanted everything to be just right. At one point, he asked that hundreds of thousands of yards of dirt be moved 27 inches to align Complexes 2 and 3.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

FOUR years ago Mr. Heizer got sick. He felt pain in his fingers and toes, which he mistook for frostbite because he had been standing in the cold 12 hours a day working on his sculpture. But when the pain moved to his shoulders and back, a Medivac helicopter had to fly into the valley and rush him to a doctor, who sent him home and told him he was drinking and smoking too much. The doctor prescribed Tylenol. The pain became unbearable. Mr. Heizer went to New York to see a neurologist and collapsed on his way into the hospital.

He nearly died. He had contracted poly neuropathy, a nerve disease, which caused him to lose much of the use of his extremities. His weight plummeted. After therapy, he was able to walk, but he had become pretty much paralyzed on his left side.

He had always been an artist who could operate his own big machinery and build what he wanted himself. Then he found himself in a walker for a year. He still needs a crutch. ''At least I'm working again,'' he said. ''I had set out to do this sculpture by myself as a young man. When I got sick I figured that was the end of it.''

Last month he turned 55.

YOU shouldn't try calling on Mr. Heizer uninvited. We were talking on the telephone a while back. ''A guy called from France,'' he told me. ''He was complaining: 'It's not done yet? How long is it going to take.' And I said I was sorry that I hadn't got it done for him. My God, you don't go into a painter's studio unless he wants you there. I got called by a travel agent who asked where the bus stop was. The project has involved a time reference the art world clearly can't understand.''

''I've lived low for 30 years and privacy is now all I ask,'' he said. ''All these rubberneckers show up as if it's entertainment. People fly over the place. This is private property. People presume that I want them to see it. That is a rash presumption. Only one-fifth of the whole job is done. Liability is an issue. The site is dangerous. The work isn't cohesive yet. When I finish Phase 5, O.K.''

''Someone was shooting to scare a coyote away from the sheep,'' he said.

''Forget my privacy,'' he continued as if nothing had happened. ''It's also about how the work should be seen. I've made it big to make you feel small standing in it. Flying over it squishes the Gestalt. It's supposed to be about a motor-delayed, cumulative observation: you've got to walk around it, climb over it and later put it together in your mind and figure out where you were. It isn't the old convenient art object.

''I think size is the most unused quotient in the sculptor's repertoire because it requires lots of commitment and time. To me it's the best tool. With size you get space and atmosphere: atmosphere becomes volume. You stand in the shape, in the zone.''

I woke up at dawn one day to see ''City.'' It looked like a vast, empty stadium, sleek and expectant. Its surface is a graduated aggregate of reinforced volcanic cinder block, colored to look like humble dirt. The steles in this light seem like cutouts, stuck on. The landscape being mostly obscured to someone standing in the pit, the mountain ridge in the distance appears only in the spaces between the complexes. The surrounding landscape isn't the point, Mr. Heizer insists.

''That's the reason I put my ranch right next door to the sculpture,'' he says. ''I wanted to prove that I am here for the materials, not for the view. I'd have built this thing in New Jersey if it had been possible. All these so-called experts try to say my work is about the West, that's it about the view. They don't know what they're talking about. I came for the space and because it was cheap land. I don't care if you see the mountains. The sculpture is partly open because, rather than put you in a box, I want you to be able to breathe. But I also want to isolate you in it, to contain you in it, like in all my negative sculptures. It's not really different from 'Double Negative.' The sculpture is the issue, not the landscape.''

But part of the experience of being in the ''City'' inevitably involves the isolation of the valley, the light and the weather, which are aspects of the environment. From 80 degrees the previous afternoon, the temperature plummeted to 15 overnight, causing an efflorescence, like frost, to coat parts of the complexes, whose masses were shimmering gray silhouettes in the half-light. When the sun rose, daylight fell gradually over different parts of the complexes. They were so big that the sun didn't seem to strike them equally all at once, which was part of Mr. Heizer's intent. Time is an element, as it is in other projects in the land, like ''Lightning Field'' and James Turrell's ''Roden Crater,'' in Arizona, another long-delayed sculpture lately revived with help from the Lannan Foundation.

The first men from the construction crew arrived by 7:15. They drive 90 miles through the mountains -- it's a dirt road, the old Denver-San Francisco stagecoach route -- then reverse the trip at night. This morning they were completing concrete runoffs for water on Complexes 2 and 3. They steered one of the cement mixers through the pit past Complex 3. The contrast of size between the mixer and the sculpture made the truck look like a marble in a shoe box.

HEIZERS have lived in Nevada since the 1880's. One grandfather, Ott F. Heizer, was a mining engineer, the other, Olaf P. Jenkins, was the chief geologist for California. State maps in California are still named after him. Robert F. Heizer, Mr. Heizer's father, was an archaeologist from Lovelock, Nev., who taught at the University of California, Berkeley. He specialized in the Great Basin, in California and in the Yucatan. He also worked in Egypt, Bolivia and Peru. He was writing a book about the ancient transport of massive stones when he died.

You can't understand Michael Heizer without remembering what his father and grandfather did. At the root of his art are archaeology, geology and anthropology. About the idea behind the steles on Complex 2, he says, ''One source is a verbal description in a book by my dad about La Venta in the Yucatan.'' La Venta was an Olmec ceremonial complex. The book has drawings of excavated stones shaped like Mr. Heizer's sculptures, with complexes of structures like the ''City.'' He says that the forms are not directly lifted from the book, but had generally been on his mind as abstract shapes. His sculptures also allude to American-Indian tumuli, or burial mounds, and to the mastaba that was originally on top of Zoser's tomb at Saqqara in Egypt, where he went with his father.

He volunteered a childhood story: when he was 6, he says, without permission he made a city out of wire, cans, glass and rocks on a hill beside his school, which the school janitor destroyed but the principal allowed him to rebuild.

He spent a year in high school, in France, then quit. His father took him to Mexico when he was 12 and to Peru and Bolivia when he was 18. He made drawings of the sites. He learned about, but never saw, the famous ancient Peruvian Nazca Lines, which he says had nothing to do with his ''Dye'' paintings or ''Depressions,'' although he acknowledges that he was influenced by similar gravel lines, made by other ancient peoples, along the Colorado River in Arizona. ''Really I was interested in taking Pollock a step further,'' he said. ''I wasn't an academic looking in books for ideas. But I educated myself about historical work that was similar to mine, to provide a frame of reference that wasn't the usual frame of reference of the New York art world and Europe.''

Briefly he took classes at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1966, at 21, he moved to Manhattan and found a loft on Mercer Street in what was coming to be known as SoHo. Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Walter De Maria, Tony Smith and Frank Stella were artists of the moment, and they became his friends and acquaintances. They spoke a language of reduction, geometry and elementary forms. John Chamberlain was making sculptures out of crushed cars. Mr. Heizer particularly admired their ''toughness,'' he says. He's averse to the idea of influence: ''My formative years were over by the time I arrived in New York. I was already making statements. I wasn't looking around for influences.'' He uses the word affinity. ''I'd say, if anybody's work had an affinity with mine, it's Tony's and Carl's and Walter's.''

Mr. Heizer would like to redo people's perceptions of the past in more ways than one. About his early sculptures in the desert, he says he recognized at the time and was willing to absorb the fact that nature would gradually overtake them, in the way that ancient sites were altered over time, but these days he makes a point of saying that he was never altogether happy with the deterioration: ''Climate affected my early works and I accepted and studied it, but I'm resistant to it now.'' He says he wants to redo the deteriorating trenches of ''Double Negative'' in an obdurate concrete mixture, returning it to its pristine condition forever. ''It will have had too short a career if it disappears.''

A model of his plans for the rest of ''City'' are in his studio: a long clay model of abstract blocks, myriad shapes, like obscure board-game pieces, in an eccentric arrangement. The project's remaining four phases, he says, are each as big as the first. Mr. Heizer wants to start on the fifth phase next, meaning with the sculptures at the opposite end from Complexes 1, 2 and 3, a mile away, to define the perimeter of the entire project. If nothing else, that would create an enclosure. But he seems to believe that he can actually finish the whole project in the next five years, if the flow of money remains steady.

Does he feel isolated in the desert, working on his sculpture decade after decade? ''Nevada is the only place for me that's home,'' he says, then adds: ''I'm a committed professional, and I would go anywhere to pursue this line of work. I'm not living here because of lifestyle. I'm here because New York is expensive and limiting.

''I've always planned to get old someday and crawl back into my studio and paint. That's still the idea. But I'm making sculpture now, and for a sculptor like me it's impossible to build big works in New York. It's too expensive. I need cranes. I operate in the 20-ton minimum range.

''I don't work with scale,'' he adds. ''I work with size. Scale is an effete art term.''

''If I screw up out here,'' he says, ''I know it will be big time. I'm going to go down in flames.''